What emotional reaction do you get to eating less?

If you’ve been eating more than you need, reducing the size of your main meal may be a change that will help you feel more in control around eating, feel better physically and perhaps lose weight into the bargain.

Win-win

Cutting down on overly large portions is a gateway to some life-enhancing and confidence-boosting experiences particularly to do with how you see yourself and your relationship with food.

Eating less also means saving cash, and when you factor in having more energy and vitality, what’s not to like?

Simple but not necessarily easy

Although it’s a single habit change, reducing the size of your main meal is still going to be a challenge. Partly because of how you might feel when you get to the end of the smaller-than-usual meal.

Dealing with the emotional reactions that eating less produces in you is a crucial part of changing your eating patterns, whether that’s to allow weight loss or to change your relationship with food.

What sort of emotions will I experience when I eat less?

We’re in ‘how long is a piece of string?’ territory with this question because as with everything, we are all different. But I have noticed particular themes in relation to eating less, the most common being a feeling of anxiety about not having eaten enough to keep you going until your next meal. You might be able to calm this feeling by gently reminding yourself

“if it turns out that my meal wasn’t enough, I can have a snack to tide me over”

This gentle reminder may work for you, in which case stop reading now and just use this. If it doesn’t work, here’s more…

The belief behind the feeling

As long as you’re not currently living with insufficient food, the emotions you’re experiencing in relation to eating less are likely to be linked to old beliefs about yourself and eating.

Throughout our lifespan we develop beliefs about ourselves and the world we live in. Beliefs help us organise and interpret incoming information and use that interpretation to predict what’s coming next. When something happens repeatedly in a pattern, we register the pattern and start to organise that pattern into a belief, meaning that we are ready and prepared for similar situations as they arise.

The brain’s ability to create these predictive beliefs allows us to do a lot of thinking on autopilot. This is partly what makes humans so innovative – by relegating the everyday thinking to subconscious, automatic processing, our current mental workspace is freed up for other things.

Beliefs are the cognitive equivalent of behavioural habits – once activated, they follow an established sequence.

Outdated beliefs hang around beyond their “useful-by” date

The automation that is so helpful at the time we form each belief in the first place means that a belief can keep running in the background like an old programme on a computer. We don’t always update old beliefs even when our lives change significantly.

I’ve seen lots of people whose beliefs and schemas around food and eating fitted their early lives where food was scarce, but when life changed and they had abundant food, they still ran the old programme from childhood scarcity. They choose large portions because somewhere in their mind is a belief that there isn’t enough. The fridge may be full, but that isn’t in itself enough to dispense with that old mindset.

Not everyone’s anxiety about eating less originated in conditions of food poverty. You might have developed a similar belief even if there was enough food available, but you had no control over its access. My family didn’t have locks on cupboards, but there were strict rules about not eating between meals. If you wanted a biscuit, you had to ask. And the answer was usually ‘no’. Not having control over access to food might leave you believing that you have to eat what you can when it’s available, even when you are now the person in charge of the catering.

Are outdated beliefs driving you to overeat?

If you experience discomfort when you reduce the size of a meal, notice any thoughts that surface. You’re looking for negatives – particularly thoughts about you not being able to cope with eating less.

Become more curious about the outdated beliefs

We can change existing beliefs, when we are aware that they are there. This is the ‘C’ in CBT. One of the ways Cognitive Behavioural Therapy works is in helping you to notice unhelpful outdated beliefs, and develop alternative more helpful beliefs that support you and fit better with how things are now.

In CBT, we invite people to become scientists experimenting with their own behaviours and thoughts. We suggest keeping a diary of Negative Automatic Thoughts to do with the target issue. As you write down the NAT that comes up when you eat a smaller meal, gently question whether it’s the best interpretation of what’s happening right now.

As you ask yourself these questions in the scientific pursuit of evidence for and against how you have been thinking, see if you can come up with a realistic alternative. Then see what happens if you act on the basis of this new thought.

Example

Situation	NAT	Alternative thought	What changed?
Ordering a starter size meal at the restaurant	This won’t be nearly enough. I won’t cope with feeling hungry	It’s my favourite dish. I can order dessert if I’m still hungry	I felt calmer and enjoyed the starter. I decided to have a light dessert and loved that too. I CAN do this!
Reducing my dinner portion this evening	I don’t know how I’ll feel later if I only have this much – I might be hungry	I’m learning to retrain my appetite and notice when I’m just full and that will be healthy for me	Feel stronger to think I can listen to my body

Repetition creates new beliefs

Gently challenging the old belief about smaller meals being not-enough will get easier with practice. You’ll notice that you start to see the new alternative thought more readily and in time, the old belief may be replaced by a new one which is much more in line with how your life is now, and which is more helpful to you such as:

 “I’m able to eat in tune with my body”

“I can feel flexibly in control of my eating”

 

As usual, if you have any questions, please do email me at info@theappetitedoctor.co.uk

 

Note

This article is only relevant if you currently eat more than you need, and if you do eat more than you need, remember that appetite hormones and appetite regulation varies from one person to the next. This blog is offered as food for thought, for you to consider and experiment with. If it doesn’t help then it’s not your fault – it won’t be relevant to everyone. Nothing is.

 

Photo by Annie Spratt for Unsplash